The Stannex

With all of this snow and ice and dark, I almost forgot to tell you … for a few hours I thought my apartment was haunted. It happened on Wednesday night, when the temperature outside was at its coldest and I’d been locked inside for about 36 hours.

I got up to go to the bathroom, but on the way I was distracted by a faint clinking sound coming from my bedroom. Peering in, I saw that the plastic, slatted blinds were swaying side to side, like someone or something had brushed past them. But, of course, there was no one around to have done so.

“What the hell?” I thought. “A mouse? A crack in the molding letting a breeze in?” That last possibility actually scared me the most, since I was trying to keep the apartment nice and toasty during my time being housebound.

But as I examined it, there didn’t seem to be any breeze coming from the window. But neither did the blinds seem to stop their swaying, as they would if something had brushed them. They just kept swinging in a slight, regular rhythm, as if constantly guided by an invisible hand. It was more than a little creepy, and I was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery … but there was another matter I had to take care of first.

I continued my trip to the bathroom, turned on the light, and eimmediately stopped in my tracks.

The previous day, I’d put in a new toilet freshener — y’know, one of those cistern disks that turns the water blue for 8 million flushes? Yeah, one of those. Anyway, it had been doing its job spectacularly the last time I checked. But now, as I stepped into the bathroom I was treated not to a bowl of unnaturally blue water … but to a toilet filled with bright RED liquid.

Blood?

Quickly, I realized that it WASN’T … it was just red water. I figured I’d gotten some kind of defective toilet cleaner that only had the blue coloring on the outer skin of the disk, and that I’d have red water from now on until I flushed 8 million times. But when I flushed the toilet, it filled with the expected unnatural blue water.

Weird.

I went back to the bedroom, where the blinds were STILL swaying to that same gentle, unheard rhythm. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find ANY reason for it, but it didn’t seem to be hurting anything, so I just left it and went back to my computer.

Later that night, when I went to bed, the toilet water was still blue and the blinds were still swaying. And, when I woke up in the morning, the blinds were still at it … but the toilet water was now BLACK!

Flush the toilet — blue water again.

WEIRD!

I kinda thought about calling my buddies, Monte and Jen, who even now are Kickstarting a new web show called Geek Seekers, where they investigate the supernatural …  y’know to see if they wanted to make their first show about my apartment. But then my phone rang on its own.

WEIRDER!

It wasn’t Monte or Jen … it was a neighbor calling to see how I was doing in the wake of the snowstorm. Fine, I told her, but I was beginning to think that my apartment was haunted. As we were talking, a truck pulled up outside my window and just sat there idling, so I closed my bedroom door.

As I told my friend about my experiences, she laughed and said that the pipes in our building were very old and sometimes ran with slightly (or even very) rusty water. We both realized that enough rust in the water could certainly cause my toilet water to change colors, but she had no idea about my “dancing shades.”

As the subject switched, I opened the bedroom door to look at them and I saw that the shades had STOPPED their swaying.

WEIRDER  STILL!

I went over to the computer to look up a phone number of a mutual friend, and we finished our conversation. Then, just curious, I went back to the bedroom … and the shades were SWINGING again. Curious, I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. The shades stopped swinging almost immediately. So I opened the door and stared straight out at … the apartment’s fan-driven heater!

The breeze hadn’t been coming from the window, it had been from the heater AND from the convection of the cooling air near the window!

So in less than a day, science had proven (or rationalized, really … because I didn’t do any controlled experiments or anything) that my apartment wasn’t haunted … it was just OLD!

I thought about it and, in the end, that realization really was more a disappointment than a relief.

It would have been cool to have a haunted apartment.

And maybe to get on Geek Seekers.

I spent most of the weekend working on a freelance assignment, checking in occasionally with the manager of my apartment complex. When, at 6:00 on Sunday night, there still was no electricity to the buildings, I figured that for sure I was going to have to impose on my friends for another night in their guest room.

Have I mentioned what gracious hosts my friends John and Janice are? They invited me without hesitation, gave me somewhere to sleep and recharge my electronics, they fed me, and they didn’t seem at all put out by the fact that I was there just as they were getting ready for John to make a trip to see his mother.

I figured that, even if I was going to impinge on another night of their hospitality, I could at least give them some time to be together without me hanging around. So I decided to go see a movie. (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol … but that’s not important to the story.)

I got to the theater, bought my ticket, and was settling in for the previews when my phone buzzed. (I’d already muted it … because that’s the considerate kind of movie-goer that I am.) It was a text from my friend Faith, who also lives in my apartment complex. It simply said, “The power’s on!”

I tell you, I almost decided to walk out on the movie so I could go home and … what? Sit in a cold apartment as it slowly warmed? Marvel that I could flip the switches up and down and the lights would actually respond to the signal? No, I stayed and watched the movie (I enjoyed it — it was fun … but that’s not important to the story), and just hoped that the power would STAY on long enough for me to go home.

Which it DID!

When I got home I found a now nearly-fully-warm apartment and, yes, lights that responded to switches. I sent a text to my friends thanking them for their aid in my time of need, and freeing them to carry on without worry of me coming back to interrupt what was probably a rousing game of Scrabble.

It’s funny how being “displaced,” even for a weekend, can be so disorienting. I didn’t have anything even close to “trouble.” In truth, I was only mildly inconvenienced. John and Janice had their lives just as interrupted as I did … maybe more, because now they have to change the sheets in the guest room. And yet, I think my relief at getting home was quite probably greater than their relief at getting rid of their houseguest.

Now that I’m back, I’m even MORE motivated to finish the de-boxing and actual furnishing of my apartment. I’m SO inspired that I think I’m going to take drastic measures and do something I haven’t done in more than a decade — go furniture shopping.

I know. I know. Sounds crazy, right? But it’s coming. You just wait and see.

When last I typed here, I was having a bit of fun at the expense of Seattle area drivers and their winter weather skills. Apparently, the Great Northern Wind took great offense at this and decided to teach me the error of my ways — that, or a confluence of bad weather and bad luck has simply occurred. Either way, the RESULT is the same.

After the snow storm on Wednesday, which deposited about 4 inches of powder in my general area, everything was fine. Things were still fine Thusday morning, despite an overnight freezing rain storm that sheathed the region in a quarter-inch of ice. All seemed well. The roads were too icy to drive safely on, and from my living room I could hear the almost constant sound of tree limbs snapping and showering the surrounding ground with snow, ice shards, and kindling, but I was safe and warm in my apartment and ready to wait out the predicted thaw.

Then, around noon on Thursday, the power went out. I battened down the apartment, going into heat-conservation mode — closing interior doors and making sure the windows were snugly covered–and hoped that the outage would be relatively brief. But when nearby friends (whose power did NOT go out) called and offered to let me come stay with them, I took them up on the offer before the su went down, temperatures dropped, and my parking lot became impassible. Good choice, that.

I’ve spent the last three days and nights with my friends (thank you, John and Janice), and I might be here even longer … because the power is STILL out at my apartment.

Of course, I’m FAR from the only person so affected. Besides all the people in my particular complex, more than 200,000 other people in the Seattle area were still affected as of midday Saturday. Almost certainly at least half that many are still without power as of this writing. And so it will go for the coming week as various parts of the electrical grid are slowly restored.

According the Puget Sound Energy web site, I should not count on my lights coming back on until “late evening, Monday.”  So it looks likely that I’m going to be imposing on my friends’ graciousness for at least another day and night (though I’m actually considering getting a hotel room tonight, just to be close to work on Monday morning … and to make this feel more like a vacation than a displacement).

In any case, on the off chance that my more superstitious explanation actually is true, let me deeply and sincerely apologize to the Great Northern Wind. I meant no offense and consider myself truly educated about and contrite before the incredible power she wields.

Could I please have my lights and heat back now?

Back in late summer of 2010, when it became certain that I was going to be relocating back to the Pacific Northwest, I began boxing up my belongings in anticipation of the move. I misjudged how soon the move would happen by about 7 weeks, so I ended up living with my office and living room filled with boxes that, in turn, were filled with the various detritus of my life — mostly books and games.

My apartment was pretty much a maze. If I wanted to get to the kitchen, I had to go around boxes. If I wanted to get to the bookcase (that had the few books I actually NEEDED to do my freelance work), I had to go around the boxes. If I wanted to pull out a book or DVD that I’d packed, I had to rearrange and open the boxes.

Seriously, I had A LOT of boxes.

The thing was, that I almost NEVER had to open any of them. They were filled with things that I really didn’t NEED. In fact, in the 7 weeks that I had them around, I only had to open them 4 times — and 3 of those times were to pull out a DVD I wanted to watch.

Moving entailed putting all those boxes in storage and keeping out only the things I knew I truly NEEDED for my freelance work. So off the entire kit and kaboodle went into a moving/storage pod … where it stayed for over a year while I figured out exactly where I was going to settle in and call home. During that time, while there were occasions when I kinda wished I had one thing or another from that pod, there was NEVER a time when I actually NEEDED anything from it.

So, when I moved into my new apartment, significantly smaller than the one I’d had in California, and had the pods delivered, the space was well and truly FILLED by what I came to refer to as “The Great Wall of Boxes” — over 5,000 lbs. of stuff I’d just spent the past 15 months PROVING that I didn’t really need.  Of course, the start of a new job, and the need to finish my freelance commitments, and the impending holiday season conspired to make it so that I had no actual time to do anything as luxurious as unpack. And so I lived another two months with the boxes sitting there, taunting me with their looming cardboardiness.

But once the holidays passed, I knew the time had come. This wasn’t funny anymore. I declared all-out war on the Great Wall of Boxes, and set myself a goal: To divest myself of HALF of the stuff I had tucked away in those boxes. And I meant it!

In fact, to prove just how much I meant it, I did a little video diary of my war against the boxes. And I posted it on YouTube. Many of you reading this have already seen those bizarre snippets from my id, but for those of you who haven’t yet, I’ll post the first of them below. In the end, I succeeded in identifying half of my stuff (well, maybe not quite half) for removal. And with the help of  a couple of friends (Hi, Anne! Hi, Sig!), most of it has even been cataloged and removed from the premises … and even now is being prepped for the biggest eBay sale I’ve ever been a part of.

But that is a story for another day. For today, I celebrate my victory over the Great Wall of Boxes … and recognize my need to go furniture shopping now that my apartment is no longer filled with boxes. (Man, if only my friend Sue were here, she’d JUMP at the chance to do THAT with me!)

I guess the biggest bit of news in recent months is that I have a job. A temporary job, but a paycheck-every-two-weeks, medical-and-dental-insurance, get-up-and-go-to-the-office-every-day job … and, in a surprise I certainly didn’t see coming, the job is at Wizards of the Coast as a D&D Producer.

You’ll note that I did NOT say that I’m “working for Wizards of the Coast.” That was on purpose because, being a contractor, I’m ACTUALLY working for a placement service. But my desk and all my responsibilities are at WotC and the people I’m working with (many of whom are old friends) are certainly TREATING me like I’m a full-fledged member of the Wizards family again.

Truth be told. being a contractor is almost certainly the best way for me to go back to Wizards. Like any long term relationship that ended badly, there was every possibility that this reconciliation could have been awkward and uncomfortable. Plus, I’ve spent the last five years building a fairly robust freelance career with ongoing relationships with other clients. I would have been very hesitant to come back if it meant I had to drop my connections to them, not to mention my connection to and interest in Super Genius Games. But while being a contractor decreases the amount of commitment the company has to me, it increases the amount of freedom I have with my non-work time. So both WotC and I can get comfortable with the new relationship before any long term commitments are made.

This situation isn’t particularly new.

It was in the works already when I made my last significant post, back in October. And my first day in the office was before Halloween. So, here in the early days of 2012, I’ve had enough time to figure out that things seem to be going well. It’s fun and comfortable to be back at Wizards, and sometimes a little weird, too. It’s great to be working on brands and products that I know and love so well.

As you are no doubt aware, being part of a publicly traded company, there are a lot of things about Wizards that I cannot say. I CAN say that my job is NOT directly involved with the recently announced project that a lot of people are calling D&D Next. And, as many of the people who sent in proposals during last fall’s open submissions window for DDI found out, I’m spending most of my time working on the daily content for DDI — the electronic versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines.

So, yes … things have been going well at Wizards. And I hope they continue to. I feel like I’ve been making very real contributions, and it’s a great time to be in those halls.

Of course, my initial contract will reach the end of its term soon, and there’s no guarantee that it will be renewed. But I’m hopeful that it will be. There’s still lots of work to be done, and I’m hopeful that I’m the guy who’ll get to do it.